Michael Murgio agreed to plead guilty last week to one felony count involving his participation in a scheme in which a New Jersey credit union was used and controlled as a front to conceal an illegal Bitcoin operation.
According to a letter from the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York to Murgio’s attorney in early October, federal prosecutors said they will accept Murgio’s guilty plea to conspiracy to obstruct an examination of a federal financial institution.
Murgio, 66, a former Palm Beach County School Board member and business consultant, was originally charged with one felony count of conspiracy to make corrupt payments with intent to influence an officer of a financial institution and one count of making a corrupt payment with intent to influence an office of a financial institution.
In exchange for his guilty plea, federal prosecutors agreed to drop the bribery charges.
The plea deal also may send Murgio to prison for up to 16 months and pay a fine of up to $55,000, according to the U.S. Attorney’s letter.
A sentencing hearing has not been scheduled.
Murgio is the father of Anthony R. Murgio of Tampa, Fla., who was also named in a criminal complaint in July 2015 that alleged he conspired with Yuri Lebedev of Jacksonville, Fla., to operate an unlicensed money laundering business and an unlicensed money transmitting business, Coin.mx, which exchanged millions of dollars for Bitcoins for their customers.
Both men pleaded not guilty last fall.
In court documents, federal prosecutors alleged Murgio, Lebedev and Anthony Murgio made more than $150,000 in bribes to Trevon Gross, former board chair of the conserved Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union of Lakewood, N.J.
Michael Murgio allegedly negotiated with Gross, who is also a pastor at Hope Cathedral in Jackson, N.J., to place individuals on the board from the Coin.mx organization. This allowed the company to control the credit union and conceal its Bitcoin operations, according to court documents.
After the Coin.mx business was integrated in 2014 into the operations of the credit union, which had just $290,000 in assets and 96 members, it was processing more than $30 million a month in ACH payments, according to court documents.
Gross was indicted on bribery charges in March 2015.
He assisted in placing both Anthony Murgio and Lebedev, as well as others, onto the board of directors.
Court documents showed Gross became worried about the “tap dancing” he and others were doing to avoid raising concerns among federal regulators about the payment processing activities Anthony Murgio and others were conducting through the cooperative.
“We can’t certify that all the people we let [pass] money through this credit union … weren’t doing something illegal with the money,” Gross wrote in an email to Murgio.
He also acknowledged the credit union had not performed appropriate Bank Secrecy Act procedures and, as a result, the credit union’s account may have been used for money laundering and other crimes.
Although the NCUA learned the credit union was processing millions each month in ACH transactions, court documents did not say when the federal agency found out about it or when it forced the New Jersey cooperative to stop processing the ACH transactions.
The NCUA also required the credit union to remove the new board members appointed by Gross.
However, Anthony Murgio found other ways to process payments for Coin.mx – primarily through an overseas payments processor. The NCUA liquidated the credit union in November 2015.
